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Frail received his university education in Canada: first an undergraduate degree in Physics from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, followed by M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Astrophysics from the University of Toronto. In 1989 he moved to the United States as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow. After completing a prized Jansky Postdoctoral Fellowship[1] in 1993, he joined the research staff of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, where he remains today.

In early 1992, Frail and Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan announced their discovery[5] of the existence of two planets and a possible third around the pulsar PSR B1257+12. Their discovery was confirmed in mid-1992. In addition to being the first confirmed discovery of pulsar planets, the find is also generally considered to be the first confirmed discovery of extrasolar planets of any kind.

Beginning in 1997, Frail was part of a Caltech-NRAO team that helped unravel the long-standing mystery of the origin of gamma-ray bursts. They used an optical spectrum taken with the Keck Telescope toward the optical afterglow of GRB 970508 to establish that gamma-ray bursts were at cosmological distances.[6] They then used the Very Large Arrayradio telescope discovery of radio afterglow emission from this same burst to measure the object's size and infer that the source was expanding relativistically.[7] These two observations have remained cornerstones in the cosmological fireball model for gamma-ray bursts.[8][9] In 2009 Thomson ISI listed Frail as one of the top three most cited researchers in the field of gamma-ray bursts over the last decade.[10]

There are many popular science accounts of the discovery of extra-solar planets as well as those of gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows. Links to a few of these can be found below.